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Britain’s House of Commons has approved, by an overwhelming majority, to allow a form of technology that involves replacing the nucleus of one woman’s egg with the nucleus of another to be used in so-called “three-parent IVF.”

This vote has been wrought with controversy. Many people are hopeful that this technology will help those women with mitochondrial disease to have biological children without passing on their mitochondrial DNA. Others are concerned about the long-term consequences that this procedure will have on the children born from it.

In November of 2013, I wrote an article about mitochondrial screening and three-parent IVF for bioethics.com that discusses the science and the bioethical issues behind these techniques. It also provides a some background information on mitochondria. The issues raised in this article remain relevant to today’s vote. I do want to add a comment about something that has appeared in recent media reports.

Julian Savulescu, ethicist at Oxford, said in a recent article in The Guardian that the technology used for “three-parent IVF” is akin to micro-organ, or organelle, donation. Arthur Caplan, medical ethicist at NYU, in an article in Wired, also likened this technology to a kind of organ donation. However, replacing the nucleus of an egg with another is not analogous to organ donation, or stem cell donation, because this kind of procedure changes the germ line. In other words, the results from replacing the nucleus in an egg cell changes not only the child born from the subsequent IVF procedure, but the children that come from this child, and so on down the generational line.

With something like a kidney transplant or a stem cell transplant, the procedure does not introduce the donor’s DNA into the recipient’s gametes, and thus, does not incorporate new DNA into the germ line. If the recipient has children after receiving an organ or stem cell donation, he or she will not pass the donor’s DNA along to the child.

Some would consider the multi-generational effect from this nuclear transfer procedure beneficial because it means that mitochondrial disease is not passed down to the next generation. Others are concerned that any unforeseen problems that emerge later would be perpetuated down the generational line. Even though there have been studies with primates and human embryos, we cannot truly know if there will be long-term negative effects until it is done on a human embryo that is allowed to mature.

However, if we assume, as Julian Savulescu and Arthur Caplan have said, that this technique is like organ (or micro-organ) donation, then should we be concerned with compatibility issues? While the mitochondrial DNA has its own replication and transcription processes and it codes for some of the proteins used in mitochondrial processes, it does not code for all of them. Many of the genes necessary to code for proteins used in the mitochondria are made from the nuclear DNA. The proteins are transported from the nucleus to the mitochondria through the cytosol. The assumption is that this interaction will be compatible even though the nucleus and the mitochondria have DNA from different people.

Healthy primate offspring have been born from this technique, so this assumptions not unfounded, but, particularly in cases of reproductive technologies, there is a conceptual and biological leap when going from animal models to human subjects. This technique has, apparently, been done in human embryos that have not been implanted in a womb, but there is a limit to what can be discerned from the laboratory setting because human embryological development is a complex process from beginning to end. We must assume that the nucleus and the other organelles are compatible, but we will not actually know until the embryo is implanted development continues.

Good riddance! Yet I just can’t get on board with the logic of Mount Holyoke’s dismissal…

In a school-wide email from Mount Holyoke’s student-theater board, relayed by Campus Reform, student Erin Murphy explained that “at its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman … Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive.”

I know people HATE when “slippery slope” reasoning gets employed for use in an argument, but the story above is exactly why I think such reasoning is now fair game. This article comes to us from reason.com.

If gender polarity really is that fluid, then do the categories of male and female have any objective meaning at all? To find the answer to that question, I turned to books written by gender scholars. Surely, I thought, they would have the answer.

And so they did (or claimed to), and their answer was a resounding no. Far from having any objective meaning, gender, many of these books claim, is in fact illusory. For example, in Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin asserts that “the discovery is, of course, that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs?.?.?.?demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both.”

Family therapist Olga Silverstein expresses similar sentiments when she urges “the end of the gender split,” for, according to her, “until we are willing to question the very idea of a male sex role?.?.?. we will be denying both men and women their full ­humanity.”

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir is even more blunt: “Women are made, they are not born,” she asserts. And since women have been “made” by society, the corollary to becoming more enlightened is that we should strive to unmake the female.

This is exactly what the influential psychologist Sandra Bem has suggested. She would like to see the concept of androgyny so absorbed by the culture that, as Melanie Phillips puts it in The Sex-Change Society, paraphrasing Bem’s views, “concepts of masculinity and femininity would cease to have distinct content and distinctions would ‘blur into invisibility.’”

Susan Moller Okin is equally wistful when contemplating a future without gender. She thinks that “a just future would be one without gender. In its social structures and practices, one’s sex would have no more relevance than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.”

If we take the above statements seriously, then we’d have to say that Nietzsche was wrong when he posited the Übermensch as the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. Rather, true utopia will be found in neither the superman nor the superwoman, but in the liberated unisex being that will emerge out of the liquidation of gender.

I think it’s starting to be obvious to most people that worldviews do matter and that “ideas have consequences”–and that is a very good thing.

Nicole King has an interesting post at MercatorNet on the subject of daycare. In 2003, findings published by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development indicated that young children in “non-relative care” were much more likely than those in “maternal care” to exhibit problems such as aggression and defiance in kindergarten. Now, evidence in a follow-up study indicates that those problems among daycare kids persist through sixth grade. Salvo covered the issue of daycare in “Daycare Denial,” including firsthand accounts from former daycare worker May Saubier, author of Doing Time: What It Really Means to Grow Up in Daycare.

What happens when all we live to work. Let’s take a look at two shows that poke fun at the white-collar office worker. In the movie, Office Space, the main character, Peter, is disillusioned with the “rat race” of office life. His work is repetitive and unimportant, and therefore, he feels that his life is also repetitive and unimportant. His life is centered on his job. He lives to work, and because he does not have the right job, he is unhappy. The “happy ending” of the movie is not that Peter eventually learns that there is more to life than work and his identity is not wrapped up in his job. The happy ending is that he eventually finds a job that has the things he likes, being outdoors and working with his hands.

Jim from The Office (Picture from http://theoffice.wikia.com/wiki/Jim_Halpert)

In the television show, The Office (U.S. version), one of the characters, Jim, is apathetic about his job at a paper company, Dunder Mifflin. Jim has hobbies, like cycling and playing guitar, but we get the impression that he generally considers his job boring and one of those necessary evils of life (his views change as the series progresses). Dwight, on the other hand, approaches his job at Dunder Mifflin with enthusiasm, showing up early, leaving late, and always trying to be a team player. He also happens to live and work on beet farm, of which he is equally enthusiastic.

Both Office Space and The Office are written so that we relate to Peter and Jim. They represent the angst that most white-collar workers feel, even if we cannot put our finger on exactly what that angst is. Peter wants to be outside. Jim plays music. But are cubicles and paper-pushing really the problem?

Perhaps the problem has to do with how we prioritize our lives. Our Western culture has bought into the idea that productivity is the highest good, and therefore work should be an end in itself. Productivity is certainly one of many signs of a good employee or a well-run business, but it is not an end in itself. Being productive should not be the end-all-be-all of life. To live for productivity is hollow and dehumanizing. Machines are fine-tuned to be optimally productive. People strive for something more, and productivity helps us get there.

What is leisure?

In pre-modern times, people whose lives were centered on work were called slaves or laborers. They put in twelve or fourteen-hour days and spent their non-working time resting and recuperating so that they can work the next day. Their value is in their productivity. This is contrasted to the aristocracy. They engaged in leisure activities, but these activities are not what we think of when we think of “leisure” today. The aristocracy considered leisure activities important for cultural enrichment. Those that used their freedom to engage in diversions or hedonism were considered slothful.

Leisure, in the classical sense of the term, is different from restful activities to help recuperate from a long day or mindless activities to cope with the mental tedium of repetitive, labor-intensive work. Leisure activities consisted of the higher pursuits, like education, art, music, and sport. It is no accident that the word we use for “school” comes from the Latin translation of the Greek word for leisure. Leisure activities often consisted of difficult things that required hard work to master, but these activities were personally enriching and culturally significant. They often involved creating or writing things that have aesthetic appeal and are good in and of themselves.

The Industrial Revolution

This two class system was turned on its head with the advance of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization, over the course of one hundred years, took menial, repetitive, undignified work and automated it. It also meant that people did not have to work as many hours, allowing all people to have a life that consisted of rest (including sleeping, eating, and bodily care), non-work, and work time. The non-work time was to be a time for leisure pursuits so that all men may cultivate a virtuous character and engage in culture-making. This resulted in more people getting an education and engage in the arts and sciences.

But something happened that caused people to lose track of those priorities. Mortimer Adler, an early-twentieth century scholar, points out that while the Industrial Revolution did much to dignify work and rid of us a labor/aristocracy class system, it also skewed our understanding of work, leisure, and recreation.

Adler lists four negative consequences of the Industrial Revolution that contribute to our malaise:

The Industrial Revolution eliminated the value of individual craftsmanship. Things that used to be made by artisans and craftsmen, like shoes, clothes, candles, or food, were easily produced in the factory setting, thus trivializing certain kinds of work.

The Industrial Revolution changed our priorities such that producing more and more goods became the purpose of all of our efforts. Adler says that we ought to regard the increase in productivity only as a means and not as an end.

As a result, people now think free time should be used only for recreation (or recuperation) in order to get back to work and produce more. It is no longer a time to engage in those things that are edifying and that often bring people joy. Instead, it is spent engaging in diversions which are not ultimately fulfilling.

Classical, or liberal, education was replaced with training for the job so that a person can become a productive member of society. This perpetuated a kind of empty meaning to education that goes something like this: “Go to school and make good grades, so you can go to a good college, so you can get a good job, so you can be a productive member of society.”

Meaninglessness

By placing an emphasis on productivity, people live to work, and therefore, their free time is spent on things that are not tiring, but also not particularly enriching. This leads to a kind of boredom that philosopher-types like to call hyper-boredom. You get the sense of this hyper-boredom when you watch Peter in Office Space. However, hyper-boredom is more than “being in a funk” or not finding the right job. It is a malaise that is best described as operating as though everything was ultimately meaningless.

Why is a proper view of leisure important? Adler summarizes the classical concept of leisure as “consisting in all those activities by which the individual grows morally, intellectually, and spiritually, through which he attains personal excellence and also performs his moral and political duty.” Essentially, it is the things people love to do and would do whether they were paid or not.

Leisure is not the same has having nothing to do or “killing time” and it is not a diversion to cope with life. Adler points out that, based on the classical concept of leisure, the good life depends on labor, but it consists of leisure.

A couple of caveats are in order, though. First, some people are blessed to be able to do the leisure activities that they love as their full-time job. Adler, a college professor, considered his job both work and leisure. But, as anyone who has ever been a full-time teacher, writer, or artist knows, there is still a labor aspect to their leisure activity. Most people do not consider grading papers, filling out tax forms, or making sales pitches leisure activities. These things tend to be compulsory, making them work rather than leisure.

Second, this is not to say productivity is bad. It is good to be productive as part of pursuing excellence in work. However, orienting your life around productivity is to enslave yourself. Recall that in The Office, Jim was apathetic about work, but Dwight was not. Their characters are meant to be comic foils of each other, but as always, comedy is funny because it contains elements of truth. Dwight had a beet farm, a leisure activity, while Jim had diversions. Jim’s character started to change when he engaged in a meaningful relationship.

We often think that our leisure, or non-work time, is unimportant, but in reality, it is very important. A proper view of leisure helps us orient our lives in a way that acknowledges the reality of having to earn a living to survive but that we crave more than merely survival and consumerism.

I’m not foolish enough to think Christians are immune to misguided or improperly motivated beliefs. I’ve written repeatedly about the perils of “accidental Christianity” and the largely unthoughtful nature of the Church. If you’re a Christian, you might want to ask yourself why you believe Christianity is true. There are lots of “true believing” Christians who are just like my unbelieving atheist and Mormon friends; committed to a worldview not because it is evidentially true but for some other utilitarian or practical reason.

This Christmas season, let’s renew our effort to celebrate the life of the mind as Christians. When you’re about to begin a conversation with an unbelieving friend, keep this important truth in view: Even unbelievers are true believers. We sometimes present the case for Christianity as though we are talking to people who simply don’t know the facts, (as if we are speaking into an evidential “vacuum”). But this isn’t always the case. Everyone’s a “true believer”, and sometimes the challenge is in recognizing why someone is committed to their views.

To learn more about J. Warner Wallace, see this article about him and his work as a homicide detective as well as being an impressive apologist for the Christian faith.

The NFL is being sued by 1,300 former players for the way it distributed prescription pain medicines so players can get back in the game. The former players claim that they were not informed of the side effects of potent pain killers such as Percodan, Percocet, Vicodin, and Toradol. Percodan, Percocet and Vicodin are all opioid painkillers and Toradol is a strong non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID) drug.

Many of the former NFL players involved in the lawsuit played during the 1980s and 1990s when practices for administering powerful painkillers, both opioids and NSAIDs, were cavalier. Today they are, in theory, more regulated. The players state that the “NFL medical staffs routinely violated federal and state laws in plying them with powerful narcotics to mask injuries on game days.” They also claim that medical staff was negligent by keeping important information on the players’ medical conditions from them, such as markers for kidney disease or broken bones.

At issue are 1) whether doctors and trainers violated the law by illegally administering prescription drugs, and 2) whether players were adequately informed of the side-effects of the drugs as well as informed of any medical issues that doctors found that might affect their decision.

Doctors Behaving Badly?

In an attempt to investigate whether illegal practices were going on, the DEA paid unannounced visits to several professional teams in November (2014) in which they questioned team doctors and trainers after the game. This investigation was to ensure that doctors were prescribing and distributing drugs appropriately, that they were handling controlled substances properly when crossing state lines, and that they had a license to practice in the state. Thus far, the DEA has not found evidence of illegal activities in their investigation.

However, an investigation from Vice Sports into how and where NFL doctors acquired such large amounts of prescription drugs, shows that, at least in the past, they were likely obtaining drugs illegitimately. From 2009 to 2010, several NFL teams, as well as other professional and college sports teams, acquired large amounts of opioids and NSAIDs from a company called SportPharm, an illegal drug distributor operating behind the legitimate company, RSF Pharmaceuticals. RSF Pharmaceuticals eventually shut down, and SportPharm was re-branded as a subsidiary of Champion Health Services, which is still in operation. Many teams would fill prescriptions in player’s names without the player knowing so that the actual quantities would fly under the radar.

Informed Consent

The second issue has to do with players’ rights, and whether they were adequately informed of what drugs they were given, their medical options given their current medical situation, and the long-term side effects.

Many of the players received opiate drugs without being told about their addictive nature, and were often told to take them for longer or in higher dosages than what is recommended by the FDA. Furthermore, many players were given prescription pain medicine without a doctor’s evaluation or monitoring. One former player reports that while playing for one team, an assistant trainer would pass out unlabeled manilla envelopes with pain medicine for any player that raised his hand and said he needed them. Another former player said that envelopes with prescription pain medicine would be waiting in the seats on the airplane for the players.

Player testimonies from the class action law suit website show that many players were given powerful pain medicine instead of being told that they needed rest and recovery or that the problem was actually much worse and required surgery. Several players said that NFL doctors knew of existing health issues, but did not inform the players. Two players’ testimonies state that NFL doctors knew that they had indicators of kidney problems but did not tell the players. Both former players now have renal failure.

Another former player, Rex Hadnot, said in a Washington Post interview that he was given Toradol pills and/or injections once-per-week for nine years. He was never told that Toradol should not be administered for more than five days due to risk of kidney damage, heart attack, and stroke. He said that sometimes he would receive both a shot and a pill on the same day, a much higher dosage than the FDA recommends.

The Mountain Climber Problem

Part of the problem with discerning the ethics of safety for football players is exemplified in what H. Tristam Engelhardt calls “the mountain climber problem.” In general, climbing a mountain is more dangerous than not climbing a mountain, but we do not consider it unethical to allow a mountain climber to scale a mountain if he so desires. Similarly, playing sports is inherently more dangerous than not playing sports. Football players take on additional risks by choosing to play the sport. Therefore, what protections, if any, are football players owed?

There is a tension between restricting someone’s freedom and allowing them to put themselves in harm’s way. Typically, with the mountain climber problem, ethicists will say that it is unethical to allow additional harm to come to the person such that he or she could not accomplish the stated goal of climbing the mountain. For example, while mountain climbing is inherently dangerous, the climber should still use a harness and ropes. In the case of football players, while it is an inherently dangerous sport, one can enforce safety precautions to ensure that players are not injured in such a way that they cannot play the sport. This is the motivation behind stricter rules to prevent concussions, helmet design, and padding.

The difference between the mountain climber and the football player is that collisions are part of the sport. Pain is a given. The former players who are suing the NFL claim that their health was sacrificed in the name of sales. But, other players criticize the lawsuit as nothing more than a money grab on behalf of former players because they knew what they were risking by playing the sport.

Despite whatever motivations are behind the lawsuit or the NFL’s medical decisions, it is unethical to de-humanize athletes, even if they willingly chose to engage in de-humanizing activities. Let’s take a non-football example: If a woman choses to trade sex for money, she is willingly commodifying herself and ultimately engaging in a de-humanizing activity. While this may have been her free choice, it does not mean that if she goes to a doctor, the doctor is no longer ethically obligated to treat her with human dignity. In other words, even if she chooses to engage in activities that are de-humanizing, that does not mean it is okay for medical health professionals to treat her as less-than-human.

In the case of football players, even if they may choose short-term returns at the expense of long-term injury, they need to be given the opportunity to make an informed choice on the matter because, ultimately, they are the ones that have to live with the consequences.

In the latest issue of SalvoMagazine (Winter, 2014) I cover the larger issue of prescription pain medicine addiction, what opiate drugs actually do to the brain, and how one becomes addicted. The former NFL players’ claims about the over-prescribing of prescription painkillers may be part of a larger national problem that saw a peak in opiate drug prescriptions during the years that many of the former players were active in the NFL.